New Books in Pacific Studies
Episodes
Ruth Mandujano López, "Steamships Across the Pacific: Maritime Journeys between Mexico, China, and Japan, 1867–1914" (U Hong Kong Press, 2025)
09 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
How did the movement of people, goods, and ships reshape connections between Latin America and Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuri...
Gregory Smits, "The Ryukyu Islands: A New History from the Stone Age to the Present" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
30 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands' history, ...
Mike Pitts, "Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate t...
Allison Powers, "Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law" (Oxford UP, 2024)
23 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Arbitrating Empire: United States Expansion and the Transformation of International Law (Oxford UP, 2024) by Dr. Allison Powers offers a new history ...
Jacqueline Couti and Anny Dominique Curtius, "Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
03 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Women, Theory, Praxis, and Performativities: Transoceanic Entanglements in Francophone Settings (Liverpool UP, 2025) bridges the gap between the Car...
Jason Roberts, "We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea" (U Arizona Press, 2024)
02 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
An ethnography of indigenous lives amidst subsistence labor, large-scale logging, and unrealized schemes, We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and...
Q. Edward Wang, "Staple to Superfood: A Global History of the Sweet Potato" (Columbia UP, 2025)
14 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Sweet potatoes were among the American crops Christopher Columbus brought back to Europe—where they were thought to be an aphrodisiac. In China, thi...
Joanna Siekiera, "International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region" (Routledge, 2025)
20 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
International Law and Security in Indo-Pacific: Strategic Design for the Region (Routledge, 2025) edited by Dr. Joanna Siekiera uses an interdiscip...
Aaron Smale, "Tairāwhiti: Pine, Profit and the Cyclone" (Bridget Williams, 2024)
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
"The Coast has been battered for years by decisions made by those who don’t live there and don’t have any connection to the place. It started earl...
Jessica Urwin, "Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia" (U of Washington Press, 2025)
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Though a nonnuclear state, Australia was embroiled in the military and civilian nuclear energy programs of numerous global powers across the twentieth...
K. Ian Shin, "Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America's Pacific Century" (Stanford UP, 2025)
23 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode, which is co-hosted with Delaney Chieyen Holton, features Dr. K. Ian Shin discussing his recently published book, Imperial Stewards: Chi...
Nicholas Thomas, "Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific" (Apollo, 2020)
20 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the P...
Kelly A. Spring, "SPAM: A Global History" (Reaktion, 2025)
16 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a conflict that solidified SPAM’s place in global food culture. Created...
Coll Thrush, "Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific" (University of Washington Press, 2025)
03 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as th...
Tuomas Tammisto, "Hard Work: Producing Places, Relations and Value on a Papua New Guinea Resource Frontier" (Helsinki UP, 2024)
05 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On the podcast today I am joined by socio-cultural anthropologist, Tuomas Tammisto, who is an academy research fellow in Social Anthropology at Tampe...
David Oakeshott, "Schooling, Conflict and Peace in the Southwestern Pacific: Becoming Enemy Friends" (Bristol UP, 2024)
26 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bringing concepts from critical transitional justice and peacebuilding into dialogue with education, Schooling, Conflict and Peace in the Southwester...
Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell, "Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene" (Routledge, 2024)
28 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Cosmological Readings of Contemporary Australian Literature: Unsettling the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2024) presents an innovative and imaginative rea...
Educational Inequality in Fijian Higher Education
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the Language-on-the-Move podcast, Dr Hanna Torsh speaks with Dr Prashneel Ravisan Goundar about his new book, English Language...
David R. Saunders, "Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965" (Cornell UP, 2024)
25 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Chasing Archipelagic Dreams: The Expansion of Foreign Influence in Sabah amid the End of Empire, 1945–1965 (Cornell University Press, 2024), Dr...
Angela Wanhalla et al., "Te Hau Kainga: The Maori Home Front during the Second World War" (Auckland UP, 2024)
02 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Taking readers to the farms and factories, the marae and churches where Māori lived, worked and raised their families, Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Ho...
Adrian de Leon, "Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America" (UNC Press, 2023)
11 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In a book that pulls together both sides of the Pacific, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (UNC Press, 2023) asks the question: wha...
Dean Itsuji Saranillio, "Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood" (Duke UP, 2018)
06 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai‘i Statehood (Duke University Press, 2018), Dean Itsuji Saranillio offers a bold challenge to...
China and the Indo-Pacific: Policies and Global Implications
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why has the Indo-Pacific become the pre-eminent theatre of global geo-strategic and geo-economic competition? What is the interest and role of differe...
Emily Mitchell-Eaton, "New Destinations of Empire: Mobilities, Racial Geographies, and Citizenship in the Transpacific United States" (U Georgia Press, 2024)
22 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1986 the Compact of Free Association marked the formal end of U.S. colonialism in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, while simultaneously re-ent...
Julian Hanna, "Island" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
21 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Darwin called the Galápagos archipelago “a little world within itself,” unaffected by humans and set on its own evolutionary path – strange, di...
Juan José Rivas Moreno, "The Capital Market of Manila and the Pacific Trade, 1668-1838" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)
07 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Economic history has always emphasized the importance of long-distance trade in the emergence of modern financial markets, yet almost nothing is known...
Sarah Miller-Davenport, "Gateway State: Hawai’i and the Cultural Transformation of American Empire" (Princeton UP, 2019)
01 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
One of my talking points when hanging out with my fellow diplomatic historians is the painful absence of scholarship on Hawaii. Too many political his...
The Dragon and the Nguzunguzu
19 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Nguzunguzu is the traditional figurehead which was formerly affixed to canoes in the Solomon Islands. In this episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to R...
Mavis Kerinaiua and Laura Rademaker, "Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up" (NewSouth, 2023)
18 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Tiwi people have more than their fair share of stories that turn ideas of Australian history upside down. The Tiwi claim the honour of defeating a...
Roger Crowley, "Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World" (Yale UP, 2024)
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The spice islands: Specks of land in the Indonesian archipelago that were the exclusive home of cloves, commodities once worth their weight in gold. T...
Michael J. Sheridan, "Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants" (Routledge, 2023)
31 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and prot...
Kristie Flannery, "Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
28 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) offers a new interpretation of Spanish colonial rule in t...
Justin B. Stein, "Alternate Currents: Reiki’s Circulation in the Twentieth-Century North Pacific" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
27 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the second half of the twentieth century, Reiki went from an obscure therapy practiced by a few thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans to a globa...
Derek Taira, "Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawai'i, 1900-1941" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
27 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
During Hawai‘i’s territorial period (1900–1959), Native Hawaiians resisted assimilation by refusing to replace Native culture, identity, and his...
Anaïs Maurer, "The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists" (Duke UP, 2023)
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well befo...
Sino-Pacific Relations: A Discussion with Rodolfo Maggio
15 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The 2024 Solomon Islands elections were surprisingly peaceful. The deepening economic inequalities, widespread corruption, rogue demagogues manipulati...
Alfred Peredo Flores, "Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962" (Cornell UP, 2023)
14 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944–1962 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Alfred Peredo Flores argue...
Joanna Siekiera, "21st Century as the Pacific Century: Culture and Security of Oceania States in Great Power Competition" (Warsaw UP, 2023)
18 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
With the ever-greater shift of the balance of global power towards the Pacific region, what does this have implications for the geopolitics of the reg...
Sidney Xu Lu, "The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
14 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sidney Lu’s The Making of Japanese Settler Colonialism: Malthusianism and Trans-Pacific Migration, 1868-1961 (Cambridge 2019) places the concept o...
Miles M. Evers and Eric Grynaviski, "The Price of Empire: American Entrepreneurs and the Origins of America's First Pacific Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2024)
07 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The United States was an upside-down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North Ame...
Martin Dusinberre, "Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
19 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories (Cambridge UP, 2023), Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamsh...
Andrés Reséndez, "Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery" (Mariner Books, 2022)
27 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The Pacific Ocean is twice the size of the Atlantic, and while humans have been traversing its current-driven maritime highways for thousands of years...
Nell Freudenberger, "The Limits" (Knopf, 2024)
02 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Po...
Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)
24 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of re...
Angela Wanhalla, "Of Love and War: Pacific Brides of World War II" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
25 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1942 and 1945 more than two million servicemen occupied the southern Pacific theater, the majority of whom were Americans in service with the ...
Daniel Immerwahr, "How to Hide an Empire: The History of the Greater United States" (FSG, 2019)
11 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
“Is America an Empire?” is a popular question for pundits and historians, likely because it sets off such a provocative debate. All too often, how...
Kiribati in the Chinese Pacific: A Discussion with Rodolfo Maggio
02 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Is Kiribati in the American lake, Indo-Pacific or Chinese Pacific? In this Episode, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks to Rodolfo Maggio, a senior researcher at ...
Leanne Trapedo Sims, "Reckoning with Restorative Justice: Hawai'i Women's Prison Writing" (Duke UP, 2023)
19 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In Reckoning with Restorative Justice Hawaii Women's Prison Writing (Duke University Press, 2023), Dr. Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experienc...
Brandon Presser, "The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania and Mutiny in the South Pacific" (Icon Books, 2022)
10 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the e...
Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)
26 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transn...
Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of the Pacific: The Great Ocean" (Robinson, 2023)
02 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jeremy Black's A Brief History of the Pacific: The Great Ocean (Robinson, 2023) succeeds in examining both the indigenous presence on ocean's island...
Jared Davidson, "Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand" (Bridget Williams Books, 2023)
28 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard-labour men guarded by other men with guns. M...
A Better Way to Buy Books
12 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has alre...
L. M. Ratnapalan, "Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pacific: The Transformation of Global Christianity" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
09 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
How does Robert Louis Stevenson’s engagement with Pacific Islands cultures demonstrate processes of inculturation and the transformation of global C...
Clive Moore, "Making Mala: Malaita in Solomon Islands, 1870s–1930s" (Australia National UP, 2017)
07 Sep 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Malaita is one of the major islands in the Solomons Archipelago and has the largest population in the Solomon Islands nation. Its people have an undes...
Quito J. Swan, "Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice" (UP of Florida, 2020)
17 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Pauulu’s Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (University Press of Florida, 2020) by Quito Swan is an enchanting, magisteria...
Steve Mentz, "An Introduction to the Blue Humanities" (Routledge, 2023)
27 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2023) is the first textbook to explore the many ways humans engage with water, utilizing literary,...
Scott E. Simon, "Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
20 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Similar to countries like the US and Canada, Taiwan also has indigenous peoples who've existed before the arrival of colonizers, and continue to grap...
Lin Poyer, "War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II" (U Hawaii Press, 2022)
17 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Eighty years on, Lin Poyer's book War at the Margins: Indigenous Experiences in World War II (U Hawaii Press, 2022) offers a global and comparative ...
Moon-Ho Jung, "Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State" (U California Press, 2022)
14 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
As the American imperial project in the Pacific World grew at the end of the nineteenth century, so too did the American security and intelligence sta...
Christina Gerhardt, "Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean" (U California Press, 2023)
23 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Atlases are being redrawn as islands are disappearing. What does an island see when the sea rises? Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean ...
Christen T. Sasaki, "Pacific Confluence: Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i" (U California Press, 2022)
28 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
What if Hawai'i wasn't the 50th state? In Pacific Confluence: Fighting Over the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Hawai'i (U California Press, 2022), U...
Peter Meihana, "Privilege in Perpetuity: Exploding a Pākehā Myth" (Bridget Williams Books, 2022)
08 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
'The idea of Māori privilege continues to be deployed in order to constrain Māori aspirations and maintain the power imbalance that colonisation ach...
Book Chat: Oceanic Writing
09 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, our host, Ti-han Chang, conducted an interview chat with the ecowriter, Liao Hung-chi about his oceanic and cetacean writings. The in...
Shaping Civilisations: The Sea in Asian History
26 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The ocean is more connective device than barrier, bringing together diverse topics, time-periods and geographies. It has linked and connected the vari...
Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, "Imperial Zions: Religion, Race, and Family in the American West and the Pacific" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
03 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has always been globally situated, argues Montana State history professor Amanda Hendrix-Komoto in ...
Quito J. Swan, "Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colonialism, and the African World" (NYU Press, 2022)
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Oceania is a vast sea of islands, large scale political struggles and immensely significant historical phenomena. Pasifika Black: Oceania, Anti-Colon...
Elaine Pearson, "Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World" (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
16 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Chasing Wrongs and Rights: My Experience Defending Human Rights Around the World (Simon & Schuster, 2022) by Elaine Pearson, the Asia Director at Hum...
Tom Bratrud, "Fire on the Island: Fear, Hope and a Christian Revival in Vanuatu" (Berghahn Books, 2022)
10 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, the island of Ahamb in Vanuatu became the scene of a startling Christian revival movement led by thirty children with ‘spiritual vision.’...
Anna Dziedzic, "Foreign Judges in the Pacific" (Hart Publishing, 2021)
25 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
While it might ordinarily be assumed that judges who sit on constitutional courts will be local citizens, in the islands of the Pacific, more than thr...
James Griffiths, "Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language" (Zed Books, 2021)
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The scie...
Thom van Dooren, "A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions" (MIT Press, 2022)
07 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this time of extinctions, the humble snail rarely gets a mention. And yet snails are disappearing faster than any other species. In A World in a S...
John Richens, "Tik Merauke: An Epidemic Like No Other" (Melbourne UP, 2022)
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A medical doctor with an inquisitive mind and a traveling spirit, John Richens thought he had hit upon an exemplary public health case study – the s...
Ugo Corte, "Dangerous Fun: The Social Lives of Big Wave Surfers" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
07 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Straight from the beaches of Hawaii comes an exciting new ethnography of a community of big-wave surfers. Oahu’s Waimea Bay attracts the world’s b...
Lisa Uperesa, "Gridiron Capital: How American Football Became a Samoan Game" (Duke UP, 2022)
16 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since the 1970s, a “Polynesian Pipeline” has brought football players from American Sāmoa to Hawaii and the mainland United States to play at the...
Nicholas Ferns, "Australia in the Age of International Development, 1945–1975: Colonial and Foreign Aid Policy in Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
05 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the voluminous literature on the history of modernisation theory and its associated concept of development since the end of World War II, much of t...
Nic Maclellan, "Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests" (ANU Press, 2017)
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nic Maclellan's book Grappling with the Bomb: Britain’s Pacific H-Bomb Tests (ANU Press, 2017) is a history of Britain’s 1950s program to test t...
Holger Droessler, "Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa" (Harvard UP, 2022)
15 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa (Harvard UP, 2022), Holger Droessler provides a novel history of the impact of glob...
Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, "Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization Across Guam and Israel-Palestine" (U California Press, 2022)
23 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Nước Việt Nam: a home, a cradle, a point of departure” (Gandhi, 1). The Vietnamese word nước embraces the duality of land and water wi...
Mikaela Nyman and Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen, "Sista, Stanap Strong!: A Vanuatu Women's Anthology" (Te Herenaa Waka UP, 2021)
21 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sista, Stanap Strong!: A Vanuatu Women's Anthology (Te Herenaa Waka UP, 2021) is an anthology of new writing from Vanuatu by three generations of wo...
Nitasha Tamar Sharma, "Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific" (Duke UP, 2021)
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Hawai'i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Duke UP, 2021) maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. T...
Sophie Chao, "In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua" (Duke UP, 2022)
29 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This episode we speak with Sophie Chao, author of In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press, 2022...
77* Polynesia, Sea of Islands: with Christina Thompson
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
John and Elizabeth talk cultural renewal with Christina Thompson in this rebroadcast of a 2019 Recall this Book conversation. Her Sea People: The Puz...
Tamihana Te Rauparaha, "Record of the Life of the Great Te Rauparaha" (Auckland UP, 2021)
16 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Te Rauparaha is most well known today as the composer of the haka ‘Ka mate’, made famous the world over by the All Blacks. A major figure in ninet...
Emalani Case, "Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
20 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawai‘i to Kahiki (U Hawaii Press, 2021), Emalani Case draws on her own life ex...
Patricia O’Brien, "Tautai: Sāmoa, World History, and the Life of Ta’isi O.F. Nelson" (U Hawaii Press, 2017)
12 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Tautai: Sāmoa, World History, and the Life of Ta’isi O.F. Nelson (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), O’Brien chronicles the life of a man...
Buzzy Kerbox, "Making Waves" (Legacy Isle Publishing, 2019)
11 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Who is the most interesting man in the world? The guy from the Dos Equis beer ads? Nope, it’s Buzzy Kerbox. This haole kid from O’ahu, Hawai’i b...
Emalani Case, "Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
21 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki (U Hawaii Press, 2021), Emalani Case explores Indigenous persiste...
Nicholas Thomas, "Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific" (Apollo, 2020)
19 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the P...
Joy Schulz, "Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U. S. Colonialism in the Pacific" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
11 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Twelve companies of American missionaries were sent to the Hawaiian Islands between 1819 and 1848 with the goal of spreading American Christianity and...
Robert T. Tierney, "Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame" (U California Press, 2010)
22 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Tropics of Savagery: The Culture of Japanese Empire in Comparative Frame (U California Press, 2010) is an incisive and provocative study of the figur...
Candace Fujikane, "Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartography in Hawai'i" (Duke UP, 2021)
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i (Duke University Press, 2021), Candace Fuj...
David Abulafia, "The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans" (Allen Lane, 2019)
10 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Building on his 2011 work The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, David Abulafia's latest book, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of ...
Emilia E. Skrzypek, "Revealing the Invisible Mine: Social Complexities of an Undeveloped Mining Project" (Berghahn, 2020)
03 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Located amid tropical rainforest in the heart of Papua New Guinea, the Frieda River area is home to one of the biggest undeveloped gold and copper dep...
Trading Birds of Paradise: A Brief History by Jude Philp
28 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Long praised for their splendid plumage, birds of paradise are a rare sight only to be found in the remote rainforests of New Guinea and associated is...
Lamont Lindstrom, "Tanna Times: Islanders in the World" (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
24 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For four decades, Lamont "Monty" Lindstrom has conducted research on the island of Tanna in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu. Considered by outsiders to ...
Jana K. Lipman, "In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates" (U California Press, 2020)
30 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Repatriates (University of California Press, 2020) is an in-depth study of the fate of the nearly 80...
G. S. Rosenthal, "Beyond Hawai‘i: Native Labor in the Pacific World" (U California Press, 2018)
18 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the century from the death of Captain James Cook in 1779 to the rise of the sugar plantations in the 1870s, thousands of Kanaka Maoli (Native Haw...
Maile Arvin, "Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai‘i and Oceania" (Duke UP, 2020)
13 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
From their earliest encounters with Indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans saw Polynesians as almost racially white, and speculat...
John C. McManus, "Fire and Fortitude: The US Army in the Pacific War, 1941-1943 (Dutton Caliber, 2019)
06 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For most Americans, the war the United States waged in the Pacific in the Second World War was one fought primarily by the Navy and the Marine Corps. ...